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Highlights

Internet Data Analytics

Internet Data Analytics allows researchers and engineers to focus on analytics by making data collection and presentation simple and efficient. Internet Data Analytics brings several emerging IP technologies together on a modern software development platform, with rich APIs that open the doors to endless applications for operations, design, engineering, and research.

Why We Built Internet Data Analytics

Routers use Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to exchange network reachability information. This information has been the subject of academic research since the beginning of the Internet.

Historically, researchers have collected BGP data by directly peering from BGP routers (or vRouters) in their labs to routers participating in the Internet BGP routing exchange. This approach is less than ideal, because it requires manual configuration, and because access to data is typically limited to ASCII or MRT-formatted text files, which can become cumbersome as data sets grow.

A more fundamental challenge with historical collection methods is that using a one-to-one collection method (one BGP session per routing data source) makes it difficult to increase the number of collection points without adding significant management burden to network operators.

Internet Data Analytics reduces these operational challenges significantly by efficiently collecting BGP & IGP data from multiple sources, in a one-to-many fashion, without requiring BGP peering. This allows researchers to focus more energy on the data, itself, and less on its collection and interpretation.

Internet Data Analytics in a Nutshell

Internet Data Analytics is built upon the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP), in which BGP packets are streamed from BMP-enabled routers in the network to a server over a TCP session.

Collecting the Data

Internet Data Analytics data collection is done by a lightweight, open source collector daemon from OpenBMP (openbmp.org). OpenBMP receives, parses and stores BGP packets with near-real-time performance, and stores the data in a transactional database with flexible reporting options.

Accessing the Data

Users can access the data directly through a set of REST APIs (using JSON) or through a RESTCONF plugin.
We are also showcasing a prototype of the RAD Analysis & Visualization UI (RAD-AV) at Cisco Live! San Diego this week. This is a powerful analytics engine and user interface for enhanced visualization of Internet Data Analytics data.

Internet Data Analytics opens the doors for researchers to create exciting new applications without the burden of BGP data collection.

About the PIs

Serpil Bayraktar is a Principal Engineer in Chief Technology and Architecture Office at Cisco. She is responsible for advancing IP Routing Technologies and creating a new Routing Analytics framework. Serpil has more than 24 years of experience in networking industry and holds a B.S. in EE from Istanbul Technical University.